wedding album design-gary fong - Anyone use?

Curious if anyone has used the gary fong album design software?

hmm!? we do not have any idea what that is!? anyways why not post here some links of that one!?

I have it and do not use it. It is easier to layout the albums "by hand" in Photoshop.

I've used (and still do) the Gary Fong software and it works pretty well for me. I really don't have any complaints about it cause it does everything you would need and want (opaque backgrounds, sizing, drop shadows, framing, etc. ) Couple it with a template from an album manufacturer and it's a breeze.

 

I am however going to try the inDesign route for comparisons sake. Not to knock the GF stuff, but to see which workflow works better for me.

Having bought and tried Gary's actions, having laid out albums by hand in Photoshop, having tried the Italian-made Album DS software, and having been unimpressed by Yervant's software, the best thing you'll find is LumaPix FotoFusion Pro. Best $300 you'll spend.

 

It's fast, intuitive, easy to learn, and will cut your album design time to 1/10 of the time you'd spend trying to do it by hand.

 

Album DS was a waste of $300. The software did not translate well into English, it's better than laying out by hand, but pales in comparison with LumaPix.

 

Gary's actions are good, but the weak point is in the scaling up of photos. When you let his actions bring in an image, it comes in small. When you scale it up, it loses resolution. With LumaPix, the original image files are untouched, and when you render a project, it goes back to them and recalculates each one for best quality. You can scale images up and down all day in LumaPix and always be assured that quality is the highest.

 

The other issue with Gary's software is that your album page sizes are limited. With LumaPix, you can choose from pre-set page layouts with bleed and safe zone guide lines, already set up for many of the top album manufacturer's sizes, or you can input your own custom page sizes for any manufacturer you like, and save them as a pre-set. For instance, I use Graphi albums, and LumaPix does not have the sizes set up for those, so I just made custom ones and saved them as a new preset. Cool!

 

Laying out albums by hand in Photoshop has the same issue with scaling. If you scale an image down, and then later scale it back up, you're spreading out pixels and losing quality. To retain quality, you have to delete the image you reduced, then bring the original image back in and re-scale it to the larger size. This is not efficient. LumaPix eliminates that problem.

 

The Pro version of LumaPix is designed for multi-page album design, as well as doing page layouts for senior portraits, advertising, and many other photography-related tasks.

 

One cool thing is that you can try and buy the cheaper version, and then if you decide you want to try the pro version, you can run the software in "Pro" mode, but output will be watermarked until you pay the upgrade price. That way, you can decide which version you really need by trying any of the three.